Bold, Courageous & Outright Fun! How P&G Immersed 200 Executives in a Powerful Social Media Experience

They called it 'Digital Night' and the gathering happened Tuesday evening at the Proctor & Gamble headquarters in Geneva. Our primary mission was to raise £25,000 for saving babies from Tetanus under the UNICEF initiave by 2pm the following day using any social media channel or tool. The secondary mission was immerse executives into the digital world.

200 executives flew in from all parts of Europe - England, Germany, Spain, Portugal... along with 50 digital and social media experts from MySpace, Google, WPP, LABEL and a host of other companies we're invited to help with the extravaganza.

Absolutely mind blowing! Bold! Courageous! Incredible experience I've encountered to date.

Here's what happened.

I arrived with my colleague John Horniblow from the LABEL team (see John's blog post) - an agency based out of Geneva after being invited by Filippo Catalano from Proctor & Gamble. To be honest - I thought it was a gala ball so I kind of dressed up in a fancy dress and dusted off my makeup to 'blend' into the crowd. To my surprise it was a bunch of curious and enthusiastic people dressed in suits with laptop in hand and mobile phone in the other.

A pre-briefing session attempted to induct us into what we were about to experience over the next three hours. It was a tad confusing - which I believe was intentional - and promised to be fun and educational. The lights went out, a man with a funny hat appeared on stage with a Brazilian accent and held a technical gadget in his hand beaming it into the crowd. I had to chuckle when it didn't work and he managed to bridge to the next presenter without loosing his spirit.

We were seperated into four teams - each themed with a Pampers product. I followed John into the 'New Baby' room and sat at a table in the back. Our leader explained in greater detail what our next steps where, what the screen behind him represented and what tools we could use. He then prompted the room to start brainstorming how we would approach our mission to raise £25,000.

Wow! We are about to create as much buzz as 250 well connected and creative people can achieve in a little over 2 hours. How exciting!

"why don't we reach out to really rich people we all know!" said one participant..." what about convincing high traffic news sites to feature a link to the campaign" and another "what if we optimize existing sites to drive more traffic to the fund raising site" and "what if we reach influencers on Twitter?" and "how about creating a video and uploading it to YouTube?"....we had so many ideas within 8 minutes.

The leader was smart. He threw suggestions back to the room and asked how we should go about executing on our ideas. But first he said "we have to put our money where our mouth is... start by making a donation yourself"

Our strategy entailed each table to work on the following:

1. The big fish - reaching rich people
2. The influencers - reaching influencial people via Twitter and Facebook
3. Content creators - creating blogs, groups, videos and themes
4. SEO - optimizing existing sites
5. Media buyers - approaching high traffic websites to feature our links

And so we started.

The lady sitting next to met didn't know what Twitter was and had a Facebook account although wasn't very active boasting 15 friends. I suggested she download the Facebook application for justgiving.org - which was the hosting platform for donations, and invite her friends to participate. She also identified a number of groups relating to the topic of Tetanus and asked the group admins to spread the word.

I ran a little experiment myself. My idea was to use SocialToo to send a message to each of my Twitter followers and inspire them to RT the key message + link. My only challenge was - I didn't bring my laptop and didn't have my password! Rats! So my second idea was to reach out to the most influential people in my Twitter community and send them a message directly. This worked! Big time! 7 out of 10 requests Retweeted my post and many more retweeted their posts representing exposure to over 100,000 people. Thanks to each of you! You're true champions.


Every time something exciting happened, the leader announced it to the team.

"We just scored 100 million page impressions... take a look! we're on the T-mobile and Bilt sites in Germany!"

"Prominent tech blogger @mikebutcher tweets!"

"Salma Hayek just donated £500 pounds!"

"Join the group we just created on Facebook"

"Tweet about the blog we just created"

"Vote on the video we just uploaded to YouTube"

and so on....

Everybody was awe inspired, excited, tapping away at their keyboards, calling friends. One P&G executive received 4 emails from other participants asking him to donate money! One colleague was giving away tickets to the Blue Man Show for the person who donated the most money from his network.

By the end of the evening we had raised £2,650 and collectively with the other teams over £10,000. We created so much buzz appearing on the Twitter Trend Topics.

To sum up the evening, the key takeaways were:

1. Create a social media event within your company to raise awareness and a real life experience around social media
2. Incorporate a powerful story or drawcard that gives people a reason to spread the message
3. Provide some basic guidelines around do's and don'ts so participants don't go completely crazy
4. Invite experts to participate and help those who have little experience around the tools they could use
5. Offer real time reporting about the progress of the event, what people are doing that's working & celebrating success
   

You'll notice that one of my followers responded with a slightly negative comment:

Soph@mariasipka sad world. P&G gets more publicity by not pay 25k by themself, instead they make a social media campaign and let others pay.

My response to Soph:

@Soph It's actually a fascinating initiative to educate P&G execs about giving up control & adopting sound social media practices. Amazing!

This is perfectly OK! Everybody has their own opinion and you'll never have everybody on the same page.